Realty Butler Closes Two Funding Rounds Worth $2.35 Million
Realty Butler has announced the closing of two separate rounds of funding totalling $2.35 million.
The most recent round of funding is worth $1.35 million and closed today, led by TIMIA Capital. Realty Butler’s earlier round of funding was valued at $1 million and closed a few months ago. It was led by Pallasite Ventures and Conconi Growth Partners.
Realty Butler is a SaaS company based in Vancouver that helps realtors create and control their online presence through website creation, social media advertising and newsletter maintenance. Establishing a presence in the real estate market—especially in bustling markets like Vancouver—is all about building relationships. Realty Butler co-founder and CEO Chris Troelstra knows this and uses his platform to offer agents a service that can often be time-consuming and take away from real interactions with clients.
“We fill that gap between something that’s super important but also something that realtors don’t want to spend their time doing, which is managing their online presence,” says Troelstra. “We give realtors their time back to focus on moving their business forward.”
The funding for the first round was largely used to break into Alberta and maximize Realty Butler’s presence in British Columbia. A little bit of that investment was also used to gauge the market in Toronto, a move that the company found so worthwhile that they set out on acquiring more funding almost instantly.
That’s where the second round comes in: TIMIA Capital realized that Realty Butler has a lot of potential and gave them funding to not only break into Toronto but to explore the U.S. marketplace as well.
“We were seeing so much success in Alberta and B.C. that we were looking for another partner to penetrate Toronto and explore the U.S.,” says Troelstra. “TIMIA was really excited with our vision of growing so we partnered with them.”
“The funding will be used to build out new sales channels and improve existing ones. It will also go towards product improvements and things that will really drive the brand forward and make things easier for our clients,” adds Troelstra.
Realty Butler has a grassroots scaling approach where they work more so with individual realtors rather than large brokerages. However, that approach has not stopped larger real estate companies from noticing that many of their agents are enlisting Realty Butler to manage their online presence.
Over time the company will continue to expand and find ways to use the mountains of data they have access to, from hundreds of Facebook pages to thousands of newsletters and websites. Realty Butler can see what drives performance and use machine learning to drive insights, implementing best practices and optimizing the approach for new and existing clients.